Bumblebee Flight Paths Could Inspire Faster Computers
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found that bumblebees are capable of complex problem solving that could ultimately lead to faster computer networks and microchips. The researchers discovered that bumblebees find the shortest route among landmarks, in this case flowers, through a simple but effective method.
The researchers set up five fake flowers in a field, each with a little bit of sucrose to entice the bees, and outfitted with motion-triggered web cams. They tracked the bees’ flight paths with tiny bumblebee-mounted radar transponders to see how long it took them to find the fastest route starting from the nest, visiting all five flowers and then back to the nest. The team then modeled the flight paths and found that, amazingly, the bees were able to find the quickest route after trying just 20 out of the 120 possible routes. And the researchers were more surprised that it seemed that the bees were using trial and error, which is a more complex behavior typically seen only in larger-brained animals.
The key, it seems, to their quickly find the shortest route was a simple system where after discovering all five flowers, the bees would start trying new routes. If a new route between flowers was the fastest yet, it would increase the probability that it would be tried again — essentially the bees were committing the fastest routes to memory and eliminating the slower ones until finally an optimal route was found.
Head of Computational and Systems Biology at Rothamsted Research, Professor Chris Rawlings said,”This is an exciting result because it shows that seemingly complex behaviours can be described by relatively simple rules which can be described mathematically.”
The mathematics is what could eventually be used to build faster computer networks, sequence DNA or help delivery companies find the most efficient routes among cities. And just as important, it could help to protect the bumblebees themselves. The researchers found that when a flower was moved or removed, the bees would keep visiting that location for an extended period of time, but then eventually find its new location or a new flower.
“This means we can now use mathematics to inform us when bee behaviour might be affected by their environment and to assess, for example, the impact of changes in the landscape,” Rawlings said.
Source: Treehugger.com
Photo: pasukaru76/CC BY 2.0
Self-filling water bottle mimics Namib beetle’s water-trapping wings
A US startup is developing a self-filling water bottle that sucks moisture from the atmosphere to create condensation, in the same way the humble Namib desert beetle does.
The beetle, endemic to Africa’s Namib desert — where there is just 1.3cm of rainfall a year — has inspired a fair few proof-of-concepts in the academic community, but this is the first time a self-filling water bottle has been proposed. The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings. The shell is covered in tiny bumps that are water attracting (hydrophilic) at their tips and water-repelling (hydrophobic) at their sides. The beetle extends and aims the wings at incoming sea breezes to catch humid air; tiny droplets 15 to 20 microns in diameter eventually accumulate on its back and run straight down towards its mouth.
NBD Nano, made up of two biologists, an organic chemist and a mechanical engineer, is building on past studies that constructed structurally superior synthetic copies of the shell. An earlier incarnation of the material was first constructed in 2006 by an MIT team — they dipped glass or plastic substrates into solutions of charged polymer chains over and over again to manipulate the surface make-up. Silica nanoparticles were then added to create a rougher, water-trapping texture, and a Teflon-like substance sealed it. Charged polymers and nanoparticles were then layered in patterns to create a contrast between rough and porous surfaces.
NBD Nano says it has achieved proof of concept with its dual water-attracting (superhydrophilic) and water-repelling (superhydrophobic) bottle design, and is currently working on a prototype and seeking funding. Incredibly, the team predicts that the bottle could collect between half a litre and three litres of water per hour, depending on the local environment.
“Dry places like the Atacama Desert or Gobi Desert don’t have access to a lot of sources of water,” cofounder Miguel Galvez told the BBC. “So if we’re creating [several] litres per day in a cost-effective manner, you can get this to a community of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and other dry regions of the world. And if you can do it cheaply enough, then you can really create an impact on the local environment.”
Source: Wired.co.uk
More information:www.nbdnano.com/
Photo: Moongateclimber/Wikimedia Commons
“The thorny devil, a tiny highly specialised lizard from the central Australian desert which lives entirely on ants has each scale enlarged and drawn out to a point in the centre. Few birds could relish such a thorny mouthful and to that extent, they must be a very effective defence, but the shape of the scales also serves another and most unusual function. Each is scored with very thin grooves radiating from the central peak. During cold nights, dew condenses on them and is drawn by capillary action along the grooves and eventually down to the tiny creature’s mouth.” (Attenborough 1979:164)
The Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus) can gather all the water it needs directly from rain, standing water, or from soil moisture, against gravity without using energy or a pumping device. Water is conveyed to this desert lizard’s mouth by capillary action through a circulatory system on the surface of its skin, comprised of semi-enclosed channels 5-150 µm wide running between cutaneous scales. Channel surfaces are heavily convoluted, greatly increasing the effective surface area to which water can hydrogen-bond and hence capillary action force. Passive collection and distribution systems of naturally distilled water could help provide clean water supplies to the 1 billion people estimated to lack this vital resource, reduce the energy consumption required in collecting and transporting water by pump action (e.g., to the tops of buildings), and provide a variety of other inexpensive technological solutions such as managing heat through evaporative cooling systems, protecting structures from fire through on-demand water barriers, etc.
Source: AskNature
Video Source: National Geographic
A robot that flies like a bird
Plenty of robots can fly, but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.
Source: TedTalks
This butterfly could hold the secret to letting you see in the dark
The opalescent wings of the Morpho butterfly embody a perfect marriage of aesthetic beauty and biological functionality. Scientists believe that a better understanding of this creature’s wings and their chemical makeup could have big implications for imaging technologies like night vision goggles that rely on sensing heat, rather than visible light.
Now, a team of GE researchers has taken an important step in accomplishing exactly that.
One of the biggest problems facing thermal imaging technologies is temperature management. The sensors in a heat-sensing device have to be cooled constantly, otherwise the image you see becomes washed out with old, and therefore insignificant, heat measurements. Imagine watching a person walk across a room while wearing thermal imaging goggles — if the thermal sensor’s temperature wasn’t kept in check, you’d be able to see a sort of thermal ghost trailing behind the person as they moved across your field of vision.
Physics World’s Tim Wogan explains the challenges of regulating the heat of thermal sensors:
The most sensitive thermal imagers require liquid-helium refrigeration. Since the heat sinks required are relatively large and power-hungry, this limits the minimum size and efficiency of the sensors. These requirements pose severe challenges for those designing portable equipment, such as thermal-imaging goggles. Indeed, goggles pose a particular problem because an ideal pair would be transparent to visible light, which is difficult to achieve with heat sinks in the way.
This is where the Morpho butterfly swoops in to save the day. The scales that cover the Morpho’s iridescent wings reflect light at some wavelengths, while absorbing it at others; these absorption/reflection properties can even change depending on the wings’ temperature, shifting the color of the wings in the process.
This is a pretty inspired biological feature, and it’s one that scientists believe could be put to use in thermal imaging sensors; but what researchers are really impressed with is the chitin that the scales of the Morpho wings are actually made of.
Chitin has a much lower heat capacity than the materials that are used in contemporary thermal sensors; lower heat capacity, in turn, eliminates the need for bulky, energy-hungry cooling methods. In the thermographic video featured here, you can see a Morpho butterfly responding quickly to heat pulses distributed first across the whole butterfly structure, and then onto localized regions of the wings.
And believe it or not, we can make these wings even more impressive — and with carbon nanotubes, no less! Writes Wogan:
Building on previous work by other researchers that revealed that decorating a material surface with carbon nanotubes enhances its ability to absorb infrared radiation, [a research team led by analytical chemist Radislav Potyrailo] showed that the [Morpho’s wings] absorbed infrared better if carbon nanotubes were added to the exposed surface. As a bonus, because carbon nanotubes have excellent thermal conductivity, the decoration helped to diffuse heat through the chitin away from the site of irradiation, thus providing a molecular heat sink.
In other words, Potyrailo and his colleagues showed that treating Morpho scales with carbon nanotubes not only enhances their ability to absorb radiation at wavelengths relevant to thermal imaging, it actually improves their ability to diffuse heat.
The question that remains is: how do researchers translate the functionality of nanotube-doped butterfly wings into a synthetic thermal sensor? Poryrailo and his team have already created an ersatz version of Morpho wings, but they still need a way to incorporate the chitin that grants them their unique heat-dissipating abilities. Once they do that, however, the researchers believe it could mark a major shift toward cheap, more effective thermal-imaging devices.
The researchers’ findings are published in the latest issue of Nature Photonics [Via PhysicsWorld]
Top image via; Chitin chair diagram via Wikimedia Commons
Source: io9
Better Body Armor? Piranha-Proof Fish Have Answers
The armor that a massive Amazonian fish evolved against piranhas could lead to better body armor for soldiers, researchers say.
The arapaima (Arapaima gigas) is one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, weighing up to 440 pounds (200 kilograms). It lives in the Amazon, and as the waters of the rivers there recede during the dry season, it gets trapped alongside piranhas, and the latter eventually attack every bird, fish, mammal and reptile they can, save alligators.
“I’ve gone to the Amazon many times — I first spent time there as part of a Peace Corps project when I was 20,” said researcher Marc Meyers, a material scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “I remember being struck by how the arapaima could live in these piranha-infested lakes.”
It turns out the arapaima can thrive in this crowded environment. As such, Meyers and his colleagues wanted to learn how it could coexist with such a ravenous predator, especially one with a guillotine-like bite highly effective at slicing through muscle.
The researchers devised a mechanical version of a fight between a piranha and an arapaima. Piranha teeth were attached to what was essentially an industrial-strength hole punch and pressed down onto arapaima scales up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, which were embedded on a soft rubber surface that mimicked the muscle of the fish. They found the cutting and puncturing ability of the piranha teeth could not penetrate the arapaima scales.
The arapaima experiments suggest a number of lessons when it comes to designing advanced materials. For instance, the corrugated, ridged surfaces of the scales, which people in the Amazon sometimes use as nail files, help the scales bend without cracking, a discovery that could be of use when working with brittle materials such as ceramics. In addition, the scales mix soft and hard materials — soft collagen fibers stacked in alternating directions like a pile of plywood lend toughness to the scale, and a very hefty mineralized layer on top lends hardness.
Such flexible, tough, hard materials could be useful in body armor, Meyers said. “I believe that this can be used for flexible armor,” he told InnovationNewsDaily. “I am in the process of contacting funding agencies for support.”
The researchers will continue exploring the natural world for inspiration, “asking, ‘how does nature put these things together?’” Meyers said. Another project will involve the alligator gar, a huge fish from the American South whose scales were used by Native Americans as arrow tips. The researchers are also studying abalone shells and leatherback turtle skin for inspiration.
“The materials that nature has at its disposal are not very strong, but nature combines them in a very ingenious way to produce strong components and strong designs,” Meyers said.
The researchers detailed their findings online Jan. 9 in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials. The work was also detailed in the October 2011 issue of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials.
Source: InnovationNewsDaily
Are zebra stripes just an elaborate insect repellent?
“How the zebra got his stripes” sounds like the title of one of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories. Sadly, it isn’t, so the question has, instead, been left to zoologists. But they, too, have let their imaginations rip. Some have suggested camouflage. (Charles Darwin pooh-poohed that idea, pointing out that zebra graze in the open, not amid thick vegetation where a striped pattern might break up their outlines.) Others suggest they are a way to display an individual’s fitness. Irregular stripes would let potential mates know that someone was not up to snuff. One researcher proposed that stripes are to zebra what faces are to people, allowing them to recognise each other, since every animal has a unique stripe-print. Another even speculated that predators might get dizzy watching a herd of stripes gallop by.
There is, however, one other idea: that stripes are a sophisticated form of fly repellent. It was originally dreamed up in the 1980s, but never proved. Now, a team of investigators led by Gabor Horvath of Eotvos University in Budapest report in the Journal of Experimental Biology that they think they have done so.
The original suggestion was that stripes repel tsetse flies. These insects carry sleeping sickness, which is as much a bane of ungulates as it is of people. But tsetses are not the only dipteran foes of zebra and, since they are rarely found in the meadows of Hungary, Dr Horvath plumped for studying an almost equally obnoxious alternative: the horsefly.
Horseflies, too, transmit disease. They also bite incessantly, thus keeping grazing beasts from their dinner. Indeed, previous research has shown that fly attacks on horses and cattle reduce their body fat and milk production. Such research has also shown something odd: horseflies attack black horses in preference to white ones. That fact got Dr Horvath wondering how they would react to a striped horse—in other words, a zebra.
Actual zebra are hard to experiment on. They insist on moving around and swishing their tails. The team therefore conducted their study using inanimate objects. Some were painted uniformly dark or uniformly light, and some had stripes of various widths. Some were plastic trays filled with salad oil (to trap any insect that landed). Some were glue-covered boards. And some were actual models of zebra. They put these objects in a field infested with horseflies and counted the number of insects they trapped.
Their first discovery was that stripes attracted fewer flies than solid, uniform colours. As intriguingly, though, they also found that the least attractive pattern of stripes was precisely those of the sort of width found on zebra hides. Zebra stripes do, therefore, seem to repel horseflies.
Exactly why is unclear. But Dr Horvath thinks it might be related to a horsefly’s ability to see polarised light, which imposes a sense of horizontal and vertical on an image. Horseflies are known to prefer horizontal polarised light. Possibly, the mostly vertical stripes on a zebra confuse the fly’s tiny brain and thus stop it seeing the animal.
Another obvious question, though, is why other species have not evolved this elegant form of fly repellent, and what the consequences would have been if they had. If humans, for example, were black-and-white striped then the history of intercommunal violence the species has suffered when different races have met might not have been quite as bad. One for Kipling to have pondered, perhaps?
Source: The Economist
Humpback whale secret may help helicopters fly faster
DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology / DLR Institute of Aeroelasticity
Helicopters can deliver military troops or rescue the wounded in tight spaces, but their rotating blade design also puts a hard limit on their speed and maneuverability. Now researchers have begun flight-testing an unlikely fix inspired by the underwater ballet of humpback whales.
The potentially cheap solution uses small bumps along the front edge of the helicopter blades similar to bumps found on the large pectoral fins of humpback whales. Such bumps give an aerodynamic edge that delays the moment of “stalling” when there’s not enough lift to keep the whale from sinking — or a helicopter from stalling out at top speeds.
“Stalling is one of the most serious problems in helicopter aerodynamics — and one of the most complex,” said Kai Richter from the DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology in Germany.
Helicopters face a speed limit because their backward-moving rotor blade goes against their forward motion of flight. That problem leads to turbulence and loss of lift, as well as strong forces acting on the rotor, which eventually cause the helicopter to stall out.
German researchers patented the bump idea for helicopters, under the name “Leading-Edge Vortex Generators.” Wind tunnel experiments led to a test flight with a helicopter carrying 186 rubber bumps —each less than a quarter of an inch long — glued to its four rotor blades.
“The pilots have already noticed a difference in the behavior of the rotor blades,” Richter said. “The next step is a flight using special measuring equipment to accurately record the effects.”
If testing goes well, existing helicopters could get a speed boost with simple retrofits. New helicopters could have the design built into their titanium blades during manufacturing.
The natural bump design already helps humpback whales swim at speeds of up to 16.5 miles per hour, or about five times faster than the fastest human swimmer.
“Research has shown that these bumps cause stalling to occur significantly later underwater and increase buoyancy,” said Holger Mai from the DLR Institute of Aeroelasticity in Germany. “Flow phenomena in water are similar to those in air; they just need to be scaled accordingly.”
Source: Innovation News Daily
Insect-inspired Material That Could Solve Our Plastic Problem
“Shrilk,” made from proteins found in crustacean and insect shells, is strong, stretchy, and fully biodegradable. It may be how you carry your groceries home in the future.
What if you could come back from the store, extract your haul, and throw your grocery bag in the garden to compost away? Scientists have created a sturdy, versatile, completely biodegradable alternative to plastic that could just make this crazy dream real. And it’s made from insect skeletons.
Javier Fernandez, a Spanish materials scientist, and his collaborators at the Wyss Institute, have created the material they’re calling “Shrilk,” which mimics the architecture of arthropod exoskeletons. Grasshoppers and other similar bugs have an exoskeleton that is strong enough to support their innards, but light enough to allow the insect to fly. Shrilk, made from the proteins in these natural materials, also adopts a similar duality: It has the strength of an aluminum alloy, but is half its weight. It’s also completely biodegradable.
Fernandez was experimenting with chitin—found in insect shells— for use in bio-compatible microelectronics. When he recreated the complete micro architecture of the shell, with proteins layered like plywood, the result was Shrilk: strong, light, supple, surprising. “We got mechanical properties that were completely crazy and very unexpected,” Fernandez tells Co.Exist.
Fernandez found that Shrilk’s elasticity changed from stretchy to stiff depending on how it was hydrated. And in addition to its spectacular strength and lightness, Shrilk biodegrades completely in a matter of months when in presence of moisture, breaking down into compounds that can be used as nitrogen fertilizer.
Shrilk is a shoe-in for use in medicine, Fernandez says. In the human body, the material has a lifetime of a few months. This makes it an excellent candidate for use in surgical sutures, or as a scaffold for regenerating tissues. Synthetic materials usually go through rigorous and lengthy tests before the FDA approves them for use in people. But, both the materials that form the Shrilk microstructure—chitosan and fibroin—are already individually approved.
Shrilk could also be sold as an eco-conscious stand-in for disposable plastics. If appropriately hydrated, its structure can vary from stretchy to stiff, so it could be used as either the shell of your cellphone or to replace the ubiquitous and wasteful grocery bags.
There are still several next steps that Fernandez and his colleagues must go through before Shrilk is ready to be manufactured commercially. But if it does hit the market, it would require a huge supply of the raw material that goes into it. Extracting the components from natural sources wouldn’t keep up. So, Fernandez and his team are researching ways to genetically engineer bacterial farms to mass-produce the necessary proteins. “If we want this to be realistic, we need to do the next step.”
Source: Co.Exist
Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
Talented and dedicated engineers spent countless hours designing Japan’s rail system to be one of the world’s most efficient. Could have just asked a slime mold.
When presented with oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities around Tokyo, brainless, single-celled slime molds construct networks of nutrient-channeling tubes that are strikingly similar to the layout of the Japanese rail system, researchers from Japan and England report Jan. 22 in Science. A new model based on the simple rules of the slime mold’s behavior may lead to the design of more efficient, adaptable networks, the team contends.
Every day, the rail network around Tokyo has to meet the demands of mass transport, ferrying millions of people between distant points quickly and reliably, notes study coauthor Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford. “In contrast, the slime mold has no central brain or indeed any awareness of the overall problem it is trying to solve, but manages to produce a structure with similar properties to the real rail network.”
The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients. In the experiment, researchers led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, placed oat flakes (a slime mold delicacy) in a pattern that mimicked the way cities are scattered around Tokyo, then set the slime mold loose.
Initially, the slime mold dispersed evenly around the oat flakes, exploring its new territory. But within hours, the slime mold began to refine its pattern, strengthening the tunnels between oat flakes while the other links gradually disappeared. After about a day, the slime mold had constructed a network of interconnected nutrient-ferrying tubes. Its design looked almost identical to that of the rail system surrounding Tokyo, with a larger number of strong, resilient tunnels connecting centrally located oats. “There is a remarkable degree of overlap between the two systems,” Fricker says.
The researchers then borrowed simple properties from the slime mold’s behavior to create a biology-inspired mathematical description of the network formation. Like the slime mold, the model first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned.
The behavior of the plasmodium “is really difficult to capture by words,” comments biochemist Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. “You see they optimize themselves somehow, but how do you describe that?” The new research “provides a simple mathematical model for a complex biological phenomenon,” Marwan wrote in an article in the same issue of Science.
Fricker points out that such a malleable system may be useful for creating networks that need to change over time, such as short-range wireless systems of sensors that would provide early warnings of fire or flood. Because these sensors are destroyed when disaster strikes, the network needs to efficiently re-route information quickly. Decentralized, adaptable networks would also be important for soldiers in battlefields or swarms of robots exploring hazardous environments, Fricker says.
The new model may also help researchers answer biological questions, such as how blood vessels grow to support tumors, Fricker says. A tumor’s network of vessels start out as a dense, unstructured tangle, and then refine their connections to be more efficient.
Images: Science/AAAS
Source: Wired.com
